Case Study 2.0: A new landscape means new timelines
Gregg Murray, Vistamar School

"I am concerned about your college list.”
“You may want to consider a few more target or likely schools.”
“Be mindful of how many supplements you’ll be writing during fall semester.”

Try as we might, students don’t always seem to heed the subtle and not-so-subtle warnings we offer to protect them from themselves. In fact, our gentle reminders can often be received by students as discouraging, unsupportive, or downright offensive. We say “reach school,” they hear “you don’t believe in me.” After one too many instances of scratching my head wondering what was getting lost in translation, I started to watch more closely as my students crafted their college lists. They added highly rejective after highly rejective school with the utmost of optimism, nodding emphatically as I asked whether or not they thought they could handle all that they were piling onto their plate. What quickly became apparent was that students and their parents/guardians had very little understanding of how much writing goes into each application or how to build a balanced college list, especially one that accounts for admissibility and workload. “It’s just one more school,” they’d say. As I reflected on my prior conversations, I distinctly recalled telling my students that they would have dozens of supplements to complete and that quality is more important than quantity, but my words fell flat. That realization led to the creation of Case Study 2.0, a new look at building data-informed college lists and balancing the workload.

Case Study 2.0 leads participants through the experiences of two students, one who applied to a lengthy and highly selective list of colleges and another applied using a more data-driven approach. Through interactive cases, participants learn about resources like the Common Data Set, scattergrams, and national acceptance rates, before reviewing each students’ college list. The real fun begins when participants collaborate in small groups and predict the outcomes of our mock applicants. The data reveals that a student’s GPA can fall in the bottom 25th percentile of two different schools with acceptance rates ranging from 3% to 33%, a nuance that can often get overlooked when using broader terms like reach, target, and likely. The jaw dropping moment, however, is when audience members see that one of the applicants wrote nearly 40-60 pages of supplemental essay drafts and sacrificed nearly half of their senior year experience. Case Study 2.0 concludes with a discussion about the importance of students’ wellbeing and mental health, a profoundly important conversation to have with families.

Butterflies in Flight: Parenting and Metamorphosis in the College Process
Lauren Watson
Buckingham Browne & Nichols School

The other day on our drive home, my nine-year-old son blurted out, “Mom! Did you know that if you try to help a butterfly come out of its chrysalis too soon, it won’t ever be able to fly? Did you know that, Mom?” He went on to explain that his teacher shared, while imploring a group of fourth-graders not to touch their classroom visitors, that the oil from human skin can ruin a butterfly’s ability to fly before even leaving the chrysalis.

When he returned to looking out the window, I couldn’t help but think about some of the well-meaning adults who I’ve encountered in my almost twenty-year run in college counseling. Parents who, with good intentions, end up spilling their own concerns, priorities, insecurities even, onto their child’s college process. And, not unlike the curious and well-meaning fourth-grader, in doing so, risked jeopardizing their child’s opportunity for flight.

College Counselors and their Magic Powers

Scottie Hill
Director of College Counseling
Annie Wright Schools

When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I knew several people who made a good living as witches and tarot card readers. Oddly, we had similar gripes about our day jobs. People come to the local witch for the same reasons they always have, but instead of a thatched hut in the woods, now they head to a fourth floor walkup. They say things like: “I want (this person who doesn't know I exist) to love me. What can you do to make that happen? I’ll do anything.” 

Postcards from Kal: Supporting a Military Veteran in his College Process

Sam Bigelow
Director of College Counseling
Middlesex School

There were so many more tourists in St. Mark’s Square at 9am in the morning than the previous night. And the late June heat, my wife and I knew we were about thirty minutes ahead of Kal who was coming from his brother’s army base by train, about an hour south of Venice, so we sought the shade, found a spot, and waited. I had spoken with Kal plenty of times, emailed with him more, and yet, now that it was time to meet him (as chance would have it, we were both in Venice, Italy, of all places, at the same time), I was really nervous.